Pavia wants city to take over maintenance

Some question timing and results of plan to bring maintenance in-house as contractor offers to slash fee by $100,000

Kate King

Updated 9:47 pm, Sunday, October 6, 2013

STAMFORD -- Mayor Michael Pavia's administration is pushing forward with a plan to bring the city's parks and facilities maintenance in-house despite an offer from the department's longtime contractor to slash his consulting fee by $100,000.

Director of Administration Michael Handler revealed details of the ongoing reorganization to the Board of Representatives Fiscal Committee this week. Committee members expressed concern over the timing of the restructuring and questioned whether bringing the work in-house would produce better results than privatization.

Several city representatives asked why the mayor, who is not running for re-election, was moving forward with the management change rather than leaving it for his successor.

"There are five weeks left in this administration, to put a (reorganization) together with new positions kind of raises some question marks," city Rep. Mary Fedeli, R-17 said at the Sept. 30 meeting.

Handler said the mayor wanted to fill vacant positions.

"The mayor's perspective is that he's still the mayor and he has not done anything besides what's best for the city, and this is no different," Handler told committee members. "We would not be doing this if we had not done the analysis."

Stamford had been poised to renew AFB Construction Management's long-standing parks and facilities maintenance contract with the city before withdrawing from the three-year, $1.1 million conditional award last month. On the same day, Human Resources posted a job opening for a parks and facilities manager; a full-time position advertising an annual salary of between $90,000 and $115,000.

AFB's contract with the city would have cost $376,000 the first year. Handler told city representatives that the administration believes it will save $167,000 in the first year by bringing the management work in-house.

"We can save money by hiring a city employee to run or oversee the parks maintenance and the facilities maintenance," Handler said. Bringing the work in-house would also give the city better control over its parks and building maintenance, he said.

"It's cumbersome, at its best, to have city employees reporting to an outside contractor," he said. "We'd like to see our city employees be directed by other city employees."

AFB, which has managed Stamford's parks and facilities maintenance for a dozen years, was the only bidder during the last two contract renewals, said Director of Operations Ernie Orgera. City Rep. Andy Sklover, D-20, asked why no other companies had bid for the work, given the recent difficult economy.

"I think it's because nobody thought they could be competitive, quite frankly," said city Rep. Harry Day, R-13. AFB CEO Al Barbarotta, Day said, "had a reputation for being good, price-wise."

Sklover said that didn't add up.

"The current contractor was so competitive that no one bid against it and now he left so much on the table that we can save so much money by bringing it in house -- doesn't make sense to me," Sklover said.

Handler said Barbarotta eventually offered to significantly reduce his price in order to keep the contract.

"Al did come back to me with a proposal to cut his fee by $100,000," Handler said. "That mitigated 90 percent of one of the issues we had. The other issue was having control over our own employees."

The administration plans to hire one full-time parks and facilities manager and one administrator to perform the work previously done by two full-time AFB employees in Stamford. Handler said he has received eight applications for the manager position and hopes to have someone in place, at least provisionally, this month.

"The lion's share of the work ... remains exactly the same," Handler said. "We're bringing in someone to oversee that. We're very confident we can save money."

Several city representatives said they were wary of bringing the change, however. Day, city Rep. Gabe DeLuca, R-14, and city Rep. Polly Rauh, D-6, all said AFB provides quality service.

"I just know that all these years working with Al, that if you call him at 5 o'clock on a Sunday or 11:30 at night on a weekday, he answers the phone ... and stuff gets done quickly and efficiently," Day said. "I understand we could be saving money I'm just nervous at this point about whether we're going to get the same services."

In general, Day said, he prefers privatization over hiring new city employees. cp1007sikorsky

"No offense to our city workers, they're great," he said. "But they're city workers and the private sector is generally more efficient and you get more work out of them, per dollar."

Orgera bristled at Day's comments.

"If you had seen what our staff did after the hurricane -- our city workers are fabulous," Orgera said. "I'll put them up against any private guy you can give me."

Rauh agreed with Day, however.

"I just think the privatization part of it is not something we should dismiss," she said, "because I think it has its place, and we have certainly saved (money) tremendously."

AFB started managing the city's buildings on a temporary basis in 2001 under former Mayor Dannel P. Malloy. In 2003, the company secured a $120,000 annual contract to oversee maintenance for Stamford's buildings, facilities and parks department.

Pavia's administration rebid the two contracts shortly after taking office in 2010. City officials considered bringing the parks and building management services in-house at that point, but ultimately decided AFB was the less expensive option.

AFB came under scrutiny in August for landscaping work done at Malloy's Stamford home, which Barbarotta oversees as property manager while it is being rented it out. The governor's neighbors lodged a complaint with Stamford's Human Resources department after learning a landscaper working at Malloy's house was a full-time city employee. An ensuing city human resources investigation found AFB officials recruited the worker.

The city worker did the work on his own time and was paid by the governor, but the incident raised questions over whether the city should adopt a policy preventing supervisors from hiring their subordinates for private side jobs. Handler said the investigation was not a factor in the city's decision to end AFB's contract.